THE DREAM - I outside my childhood home. I am looking around the neighbourhood(they are all bungalows) and see a house has a large painting of a castle in the window. You can see right into the house. I then look around and see more houses and they too have big paintings and they all appear to be of castles. Some are big and some are small. They are all beautiful paintings. I look in my childhood home. There appears to be some pictures of an abstract nature. They seem like an amoeba. I then appear to have a cold. I am trying to sleep and my airways are blocked up. I am then in my bedroom and say to my sister that death will come this year. I think of my grandfather.

THE REALITY The day before the dreamer heard that bird flu had spread to North Korea. This was a deadly strain of bird flu and many scientists have said this will result in many deaths in a major flu epidemic. The fact that the epidemic had got to North Korea set the dreamers mind thinking - North Korea is a highly inefficienct communist country and once it has reached there there is no hope of resisting this. It is inevitable.

DREAM INTERPRETATION The obvious connections with death maybe link straight away with the dream . The cold is another obvious link. The castles in the houses maybe signify the way the world will become if there is a deadly outbreak of killer flu - in 1919 people just stopped going out in the streets. The same happened with the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong and china. They made a fortress of there homes and sought safety and sanctuary there. Amoeba means an ever changing shape. That signifies the way that the flu virus is ever changing. It resistant and only a matter of time before it breaks out with a new strain. One which will become highly infectious to humans. Part of the dream takes place in my bedroom - a symbol of something which is highly personal and affects the private world. A major world outbreak would hit us all very personally - affecting us deeply.

It is not so much a premonition dream as a dream anticipating the future. It is about the dreamer thinking about the possibility of bird flu and the consequences. The death of the dreamers grandfather maybe simply relates to fears thoughts that any outbreak of bird flu would kill many old people so his grandparents were most vulnerable.

Symbolic Meanings
AMOEBA : "the gas or amoeba was in a continuous process of adaptation and change just like a flu virus which continually mutates"
BEDROOM : "something affects you very much - the dreamer wonders what bird flu will mean for him when it breaks out"
BUNGALOW : "something that exists on one level - only the facts are important(how people react)"
CASTLE : "people will simply not go out - they will turn their homes into fortresses "
GRANDFATHER : "if bird flu broke out then it would be the old - like his grandfather who would die first "
PICTURE : "see something in a particular way - imagine something in a certain way - in this case imagining the worst"
SISTER : "think openly and freely on a subject"

DREAM MEANING The dream captures the following feeling within the dreamer - "Yesterday I heard in the news that bird flu had hit North Korea. They have no chances of keeping this under control. Its only a matter of time before bird flu mutates and spreads into the human population. When that happens people will just lock themselves behind their doors."

Try to see how the symbolic meanings weave together to form a conceptual insight into the effects of a possible flu epidemic